Matt Best: Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with myself, Matt Best and as ever, the wonderful Jonny Adams.
Jonny Adams: Thank you, Matt.
Matt Best: And today's podcast is actually slightly different from some of our usual discussions, but we're absolutely thrilled to have our now colleague Martin Zeman join us today. Martin, welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast.
Martin Zeman: Thank you very much. Excited to be here.
Martin Zeman: Perfect. So actually, going back years, maybe this is like 12 years when I when I became a consultant, the push that got me over the line. I was working with this company, probably 200 employees, and was actually my former boss. He called me one day and he said, I just bought this new company, and I have no idea what's happening in here, so I need you to come here and put the data and reporting in place, which I did. And once we have done that, they realized that they have got six months worth of cash, and then they go bankrupt. And they turned to me and they said, Look, we need you to give us some more insights so we can turn this company around, and by the way, we can afford you. So what do you say? And I was like, okay, and then it was the best experience of my life when they turned to me. And then one day, they would ask me a question. The second day, I would give them the answer in form of a dashboard or report. The third day they would take action, and over the
Matt Best: Wonderful. So the slight nuance with today's podcast versus some of the other podcasts that you may have, you may have dialed in and listened to or tuned in to listen to, we're going to be unpacking something really, really important, and something that we know has a big impact on lots of organizations. And one of the reasons why, Martin, that you're now joining forces with with us at SBR consulting. And that is, of course, how you can drive the most value out of change programs that sales directors, the other leaders out there who might be listening to this podcast might be thinking of running. What was it, Martin, that's the biggest sort of value for you, what was the pull for you joining forces with SBR
span of three months, they completely turned the business around. They same amount of money they were losing before they were now making in profit. And they took a lot of a lot of action. It was very, very powerful. I learned so much. It was the first time that actually saw how much of an impact data can make in the right hands at the right time. And I was like, This is what I want to do with other organizations to make a real, real impact in business. And I said, Okay, I'm starting my consultancy now. I'll be a consultant. Then I realized actually I need to learn to sell, which took me years. I need to have a particular niche or focus, because people are buying specialists rather than journalists. But once I've kind of got there, got competent at selling, got my sweet spot, I found out that actually I spent a lot of time working on the projects, and I don't have as much time to actually measure the impact, and I felt some of the projects weren't as fulfilling, and that's
Martin Zeman: pet peeve. I feel, as consultants, we are not as regularly taking ownership of the results for the clients. And I feel clients often don't require on don't create that accountability for us to say actually exactly what should we see? How are we going to measure it? And then measure it diligently so they can see whether, whether we deliver or not. Often, I feel they choose based on past experiences, past case studies and brand and then kind of feel, okay, well, this is the top four consultancy like, you know, my vision and my belief is that every project should have clear definition of how it should be delivering the value and it should be, it should be measured, and, yeah, it's a whole kind of framework to get this right and do it properly, and it takes extra effort, and it takes extra kind of collaboration with the clients, but I think unless we are measuring the impact, like, what's the point?
one of the biggest reasons why I'm so excited for joining SBI, because I see the impact that we can make together, the combination of the sales expertise, from strategy to execution, and then combining it with data, which I feel there's a natural multiplier effect. So it's different skill set, different perspective, but they are really combining together to something bigger. So I believe I'll be able to spend less time selling, less time on admin and project management, and more time actually measuring the impact and helping companies to unlock that impact. So that's my excitement.
Matt Best: So where do you start? Martin, so if you're, if you're a sales director, let's say, or actually, more probably more likely, you're a CRO or a chief growth officer, and you're saying, we need to drive growth in our organization. Where do we go?
Martin Zeman: My view is to do it properly. Is basically look at the organizations and assess it kind of end to end, or look for the big opportunities, big levers that you can pull to make a difference. And at SBR, we do it from the sales process and sales methodology and sales leadership angle. I do it from the data perspective. So I did take the take the CRM data, and then analyze it, and then we slice the data by different elements. So we we look for concentration of sales by clients, by sales people, by products, we look at the conversion rates by the same things to identify the sweet spot, areas, channels, clients, products, again, sales people, and then look at the sales people's process, stage by stage. Where are they doing well, where are they not doing well. Ultimately, what we are looking for is the opportunity gaps, and seeing how big those gaps are, and this almost, almost, is talking towards the impact that is possible. That's the starting
point. So where our assessment always starts is kind of get the feeling from the organization, how they expect the growth to come from? Is it new business. Is it from existing business? Is it by improving their BDR theme? Is it through pure kind of growth and scaling their organization? Is it through MNA, which is another interesting use case? Okay, you buy another organization, and then you envisage that you will just manage the sales teams together, and there'll be so much cross sell that you will be so rich that you'll retire next year, which rarely happens. But understanding what's their play, where do they feel the opportunity is? And often, quite very often, they know this is the opportunity, because they've got the experience they work in the business day to day. So that kind of gives us the focus on what to drill down into. And then, from my perspective, is to take it to the next level and basically use the data that reflect this opportunity and validate whether the
opportunity is really there, how big that opportunity is, and kind of model out how it could look like. So let's take an example, right? So basically, you tell me you are the client, so you want to grow from 100 to 100 200 to 200 next three years. Where will this grow come from? So if you say, m, a, where is that coming from? Is it increased cross sell? What's your expectations? What are your hypotheses? What will happen? So you know, will your cross sell increase by x? What will be the conversions? Will be the volume, same with net new Okay, well, net New York already selling. What is going to change? What is going to get better? Get better? Is it your marketing and lead generation? Is it your conversion rates? Is it the average order value? Do you have a sense of those? Now we will take the data, and we would look at it, present it, visualize it, and see what the current spread is. And all the metrics are very useful. So if we take the lead generation, let's look at
Martin Zeman: be able
where the leads are currently coming from, or where is the business coming from. So of course, like leads doesn't necessarily mean the business, but we could look at the channels, or potentially even campaigns, and look at all the metrics. So look at the volume of leads generated, and then conversion to the next stage. Conversion, next stage coverage, the next stage I. Ultimately, we are answering which of the channels are delivering the right volume of of leads, what is the conversion rate to sales, or what is the quality of the leads from there and then ultimately, like, what the what the value of those leads becomes? So we look at that from Channel perspective. We can look at the same metrics, but by broken down by sales people, for example, which can then show you. And then, to keep it simple, let's group the sales people to quartiles so you can see what your top performance are achieving. You can see what your middle two quartiles are doing and what your bottom
Matt Best: journey, then as we, as we're on that journey with the client, or the clients on that journey themselves, and they're saying, How do I know if this is working exactly?
quartile is doing. And this is very, very useful, because then it shows you we know what is attainable, because our top performers are already achieving this. So surely it's doable. Not everyone is doing it. But if we, let's say, took the next two quartiles and brought them to the bottom level of the top quartile, what would it mean, and which are the metrics that actually are the difference makers in there? So is the main difference? The conversion is the main difference, the average order value. What is
Martin Zeman: So I kind of see it in before, during and after. We still need to kind of codify like, Okay, well, these are the key metrics. This is what we actually expect to happen, right? So rather than saying, Okay, well, here's the it's all about the playbook. No, it's about the results. And the results are this and this. And if we improve the conversion rate by this much and average, or the values by this much, which is what the playbook is directly impacting, that's the results that we are after, right? And what this does to clarifying and then get really clear at the beginning of it. It gives the clarity to the to the client. And let's say we work with the chief revenue officer, then the chief revenue officer can bring it to the CFO, who is signing on the budget, and can say, Look, this is our business case. It will cost us this much, but this is the value that we are going after, and these are the data that is supporting that the opportunity is real and where we will
unlock it. So it's good for the client, it's really, really good for us, because we have got that clarity as well, and we know we what we need to achieve, rather than kind of assuming we need to just kind of deliver grow. It's just very intangible, like we know exactly it's this metric, right? So as. And and we take the ownership for it, so then during the delivery, we can monitor this, these these metrics, and see if it's working or not. It's it's never a straight line. It's might not still be happening. And then we need to go and find out why. Now, is it about the training? Is it individuals? What else can we do? So it actually improves our delivery over time, because we become experts on the results. And one more point is, it turns us into a single team, right? So I often feel like, without this, you are kind of the consultants, and you are taking the money and giving the expertise, and then the client is kind of like, you know, feeling like, oh, you know, they are
working against us in a way, whereas this is, this is our objective. We are doing this to achieve this particular outcome, and if it doesn't work, we will all do our best to figure out, like, why, why not? And fix it so that, for me, is the biggest assignment, because it's kind of like one team.
Matt Best: And we've been talking on the podcast recently, Jonny with with various other guests around, measuring the, or not just measuring that impact, but sort of really standing by it. There's then a number of other questions that we've got to answer first, though, before we can embark on it. Like, okay, well, how quickly are we going to see any of these results? What are they likely to be shaped like? In what order, if we're delivering multiple different deliverables or outcomes. What's the outcome and what's the pace at which that's going to drive change, or expect that to drive change in the business.
Martin Zeman: 100% and I feel if you're a B to B organization selling to enterprise, by your sales cycle might be six months, nine months a year. So okay, I do have the luxury to wait that long to see the results. So it's a great point. Okay, it's to answer. What are the metrics that we might see the improvement on early on, which might not be the growth, the sales itself, but it might be the critical success factors, right? The number of meetings, the number of opportunities created, the volume, the value of the opportunities created. So it's the other layers that enables us to get to the answer quickly, answer whether it's working or not, and the the need to adjust.
Matt Best: When we sort of think about that, sort of then transition, Martin, so we've said that we've set out those goals. Once that's done and we're in flight, what are we looking at? What have we got to keep track of?
Martin Zeman: Yeah. So I think it comes from what we kind of defined at the beginning, what the what the main impact is, and what are the key driving factors? And that's kind of like both at the lagging indicators and the leading indicators, and that's exactly what we will be monitoring, and again, breaking breaking it down by all the different dimensions that can help us identify, not only what happening, what's happening, but why it's happening. It's the same information, but just monitoring on a on a regular basis, look at the trends time over time, and then give you and the client across the kind of senior leadership and the middle leadership ability to dive into the detail. I think this is the important thing for reporting, and that's why you need a Modern BI tool rather than Salesforce, actually is quite limited when it comes to drilling down and interacting with your reports and answering these follow up questions. So something like Power BI or similar
tools where you can really interact with the with the report. So you see, oh, there's something problematic over here. I need to answer the follow up question. Like, I need to know why that is is it because of the salespeople? Is it because of the sales process? Is it because of the quality of the leads, and by giving this to the disposal of the of the client, both on the team leader and senior leadership level, that then unlocks them to, you know, fix the issues or improve the performance further. So that would be the monitoring.
Jonny Adams: You know, to help listeners understand if they wanted to go and build these reports themselves. What would be your sort of three tips towards building a report like this?
Martin Zeman: So it's super simple, but really, really impactful. So I use this easy framework. So instead of starting from the data layer to basically take the data and analyze it and present it, always start from a problem. Let's, let's agree what the I've got this mnemonic, PMA, Q, D, please make a quality decision. That's how I remember it. And it started the problem like, what are we trying to solve for m? For metric? What is the metric that would tell us whether the problem got solved or not? A is for actions. What are the actions that can help us influence that particular metric, because you don't want to build something just not actionable, you will not be able to do anything with it. And once you know what the actions are, you define what the questions are that you need to answer in order to decide whether you take action A or action b. And once you know the questions, you know what data you need in order to answer those questions. So let's go go from the
problem all the way down to the data, and then you go the other way around. You take the data, answer the questions in form of a report or a dashboard or analysis, then you give it to the team. They take the action. We keep monitoring the metric that we are trying to influence, and ultimately, we solve the problem with some loops back and forth, because, you know, the. That's, that's what real life is about. Like, it's not working usually on the first try, but that's it. PMA, Q, D.
Jonny Adams: He says that's easy, but that is very interesting. I think that's where your entrepreneurial flair is then built with your data analyst background, right?
Martin Zeman: Yeah, absolutely.
Jonny Adams: And I think so we've got the before piece, which is baseline in the current situation, then we've got, Hey, what are those initiatives? All of that can be visualized in data and using and using tools and data. So once you've got that the initiatives are running with, we sort of periodically checking in with these sort of data insights to see whether it's working, tweaking and tailoring where we want to go. That's all great. What do I do at the end?
Martin Zeman: Well, hopefully in the end, well, we definitely should measure it, right? So, and this is what I feel the current situation often, is consultants, agencies, they deliver their projects, and then in the end, they basically ask the clients, okay, so what was the impact? And right? And the client say, Okay, well, we increase this by 20% and it's great. It's good for the case studies, but you would have lost on all those improvements along the way, and all that clarity and all that like, you know, like really strong wind in the in the right direction. So my vision is basically to have a framework and do this, like with every single project, and measure it. So obviously, for us as consultant, it's very useful to get the feedback for our services, did it actually work? Did what we said? It will deliver, delivered, and if not, why? What can we do next time to make sure that it will deliver? Great and there's a lot of things that can go wrong, right? Like the reason why I feel
it's not an absolute standard in consultancies, right? Because they can say, Okay, well, we deliver the direction and the strategy and the advice, but then it's up to the organization to deliver, right? So it's outside of our control, but I want to work for organization where we basically say we take ownership for it, and if we don't deliver, like at least, we get the lessons learned from it, so we deliver better, and we will be able to even advise the same clients on you know, why it didn't work, or show them why didn't work. And that's that. That's fine, not everything might work, but understanding why not is really valuable. But it's it's very valuable for the for the clients as well, right? Because everyone on the client side also has has a boss, right? So if you are the chief revenue officer, you're reporting to the CFO CEO. But if you are CEO, you are reporting to your shareholders. So for you, it's very valuable to actually have a case study that you can then present
back to them, but it's also very powerful to share this success story internally, because people love to be associated with success. So if you can show the teams like, Okay, this is what we have done as a team together. It really lifts people's spirits, and they're really proud of working in that organization. So it's multifaceted, but it takes time, it takes effort, it takes focus, and it takes the skill to do it.
Jonny Adams: That's really interesting. And one of the things we're hearing in the marketplace, what we hear a lot about is that CROs CEOs CFOs, are going to rigorous board meetings and sweating a little bit before they go in. The pain point that we're hearing at the moment is that the CRO doesn't have enough insight that then the CEO is barking down there that you know that in their face to say, give me what I need, and then because the investment manager in the board is going on the CEO. So how do you solve for that?
Martin Zeman: Yeah, it's the predictability of sales. Is the gold, gold nugget. And, you know, at SBR, we are big, big advocates of the creative success factors. So focus on the leading indicators. Focus on the meetings, you know, like, I know already today what our revenue will be in a year's time or six months time, because it's all driven from the meetings, right? You get this many meetings, which will translate into this many opportunities created, and that will translate into this many proposals, and it will translate into this many wins, because the process is set up that way, right? Everyone's following the same sales playbook, basically, right? And if you, if you have a CFO like this, and he comes to the board meeting and basically says, Okay, well, this is what's going to happen, and this is why, and this is how, in the last three years, that exactly happened, what we forecasted, the understanding of their own revenue engine. That's what you want to achieve.
So that's the answer. You need to get your revenue engine to a place where you know it's predictable. It's basically a machine that operates the same time every time, and the way you do it is exactly through sales playbooks and accountability in your sales team.
Jonny Adams: Yeah. So it feels like that headache that CROs CEOs of private equity backed organizations. It's just not going away. Why can Salesforce not do what they need, which is a report that you can demonstrate and feel comfortable, that you can back the data like, why can Salesforce not do and why do they need a service that has someone that's a data analyst, that can spin up some great BI reports? I don't understand.
Martin Zeman: The answer with Salesforce is easy. Salesforce are selling tools. They are selling a product. They are kind of happy as long as the clients buy that. I kind of feel like it's not their responsibility. And a lot of organizations, they actually are able to implement it. But I think this what's missing, is that that rigor, that skill set to enforce a process and enforce that your sales teams are following that. And I've I often see that that's not the case. That's that's the missing piece. And if you don't support them from the from the top down, and the CEO says, like, fill this in, this will not get filled and naturally so, because sales team needs to focus on selling, right? So they don't care as much about the quality of the data. So unless you make it valuable for them, incentivize them by valuable insights for themselves, it will be a low priority, a lower priority for them.
Matt Best: I think this goes back to that having the tech work for you, not you working for the tech. And I think this is a common I always think of sales forces. I'm going to use another analogy. This one might not be all that robust, but, you know, Salesforce provide the shell of the house, right? Someone's still got to fit it out. Someone's still going to choose the color of the walls, and it's their choice that makes it either look rubbish or great. It's a mechanism to create the stuff that you need, but it's not creating the stuff for units at the overlay of the the expertise, the knowledge, and then, I think you're quite right, Martin, it's it's also the credibility to then go and drive that conversation and drive that and drive the adoption within an organization.
Martin Zeman: Yeah. Well said.
Matt Best: Brilliant. So I mean, Martin, it feels here that we've really unpacked quite a lot, and quite a lot for people to think about. We talked about the importance of recognizing what we need to do right at the beginning, up front, when we're embarking on a project, what we should be continuing to track throughout the project, and then right at the end, how we then carry that forward, and then how we sort of leave a bit of a legacy, really, and then recognize whether the project has been a success or not. But, I mean, if you were to, I know I'm gonna ask you to distill this down, or actually just provide sort of one final sound bite of advice for the audience, like, if you were to, again, if we think about the audience, you're a sales director, you're a CRO listening to this, you're about to embark on a big change program in your own organization. What would your one line of advice be for them?
Martin Zeman: Yeah, it would be with every project. Get really, really clear and specific about what is the impact that you want to achieve from it.
Matt Best: What is the impact you want to achieve from your project? That is the message headline for today's podcast, Martin, thank you so much for joining us. We've loved having you, having you with us on the Growth Workshop Podcast, and we look forward to chatting again soon.
Martin Zeman: Thank you so much.
Jonny Adams: Cheers.